One major common problem faced by cellular and landline service providers is market competition. In today's climate of competitive markets, cellular service providers have found that one way for them to grow market share and defend their businesses is to be proactive and form alliances, and to partner with landline service providers. In addition, cellular service providers seek to differentiate their service offerings, and to capture the largest portion of market revenue by meeting an ever increasing demand for access to a wide range of media forms such as MP3 encoded audio, still and video imaging, data, instant messaging, and email. In a similar manner, the landline service providers have found that to grow market share and ward off competition, they too must be proactive and form alliances, and to partner with cellular service providers. Support for broad economical access to these converging forms of communication is needed to enable unfettered market growth, and to support the development and use of new handheld devices needed to provide increasing levels of mobile multimedia communication functionality.
Although the formation of alliances and partnerships between cellular service providers and landline service providers may help to ward off competition, such alliances and partnerships are faced with other problems. For example, the erection of cellular infrastructure such as cellular towers may be an expensive venture since this may require acquisition of real estate, whether in the form of outright purchases or through leasing. Cellular infrastructure also requires the establishment of one or more expensive backbone links to handle core network traffic. Another cellular-related problem is that the cellular signals do not penetrate and propagate in buildings such as homes and offices very well. This is especially true with the frequencies that are typically utilized in the United States, which may vary between 800 MHz and 1900 MHz or 1.9 GHz.
To support operation in present day wireless networks, access devices such as, for example, cellular telephones and wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs) are sometimes provisioned manually, at a point of purchase, by a customer service representative. Such provisioning installs parameters required for operation with a particular service provider. Alternatively, such access devices may be automatically provisioned via the wireless network of a service provider, based upon customer activity at a web site, or a telephone conversation with a customer service representative. Depending upon the nature of the information to be provisioned, the number of active subscribers, and other factors, the programming of the cellular phone or PDA configuration/provisioning parameters may take from a few minutes, to several hours to complete.
In spite of the fact the electrical design of most current wireless handsets allows much of the firmware/software to be updated, it is seldom attempted due to the low data rates available via the typical cellular wireless network. Consumers typically return a mobile handset to a business location of their cellular service provider to have the memory of the cellular phone reprogrammed. This is inconvenient and time consuming, and few subscribers bother to have updated firmware installed. The costs involved with the use of the current infrastructure are also a deterrent for the service provider to engage in firmware updates. The lack of an easy and quick method of updating mobile handset firmware slows the deployment and adoption of new features, and leaves faulty or misbehaving mobile handsets in the field.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.